


To Be Brave

by LadyLienDa



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo 2019 [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Blood, Blood Loss, Gen, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Lots of it, prompt: cauterizing a wound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 17:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17369996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLienDa/pseuds/LadyLienDa
Summary: Written for Bad Things Happen Bingo.Prompt: Cauterizing a Wound.Keith is on a mission with Shiro and Hope when things go badly wrong. Can they be strong together to ensure his survival?





	To Be Brave

**Author's Note:**

> This prompt was requested by the lovely Callaeidae3!  
> "Ooo for the bingo, how about Cauterising a Wound with Keith and Shiro and Hope being the ones having to do it? :O"
> 
> *If you don't know who Hope is, check out my Purpose series to read more about her. Basically, she's my OC who joined the paladins after they visited Olkarion back in Season 2.

There had never been a worse time to sneeze.

 _Lance will never let me live it down!_ Keith thought as another rifle shot rang throughout the cramped hallway like a…well, like a gunshot. Unlike the Empire’s weird obsession with energy blasters, these aliens used long-necked weapons that were surprisingly Earth-like in their use of bullets. Keith wasn’t sure which would be worse. Get a patch of your suit (and several layers of skin and possibly bone) fried off with blaster fire? Or have a bullet pierce straight through your armor? At least the blaster beams were easier to see.

The hallway was dark and narrow, with grimy, uneven floors dotted with puddles of unidentified, foul-smelling liquid. There were very few guards about and Keith and Shiro would have been just fine sneaking through if they hadn’t found out the hard way that Keith was especially sensitive to whatever fumes those puddles were giving off.

The only warning he had was the sudden, awful tickling in the back of his nose and throat. His whole body locked up like the brakes on an old car and he didn’t even have time to lift his elbow before the silent corridor was ringing with the sound of his explosive sneeze.

The guards they had so deftly slipped past only moments before were instantly alerted. And just when he’d been feeling proud of his own stealth skills! Cursing his bad luck and his earlier decision to disable the front of his visor, Keith dove towards Shiro, knocking him into an adjacent corridor out of the way of the gunfire he knew would follow. Sure enough, gunshots began to sound from farther down the hallway almost before he hit the ground. The sound was deafening, even with his helmet on. He found himself wishing for the regular Galra sentries he’d encountered so frequently. At least they were somewhat predictable. These mercenaries were a real force to be reckoned with.

“So much for stealth!” Keith cried as they both scrambled to their feet and bolted down the other hallway, ducking into the first doorway they reached.

“Well, I think we can safely say this mission is a bust.” Keith muttered, helping Shiro close the heavy metal door. It was fastened with a wheel in the center, like on a sailing ship back on Earth.

  “It certainly is for our end.” Said Shiro. “There, that should hold them off for a bit.” He tapped a button on his wrist console. “Hope, do you copy?”

Through the comms, a muffled banging could be heard, followed by frustrated muttering.

“ _Ooh, this would be so much easier if I could actually FIND the right wire! By Lubos! When I said I wanted to come on missions with you guys, climbing through narrow shafts like a frill-nosed munkor was NOT what I had in mind!”_

“Um, Hope?” Shiro interrupted. “We might have a situation.”

“ _You ‘might’?”_ Hope repeated, sounding strained. There was an especially loud _clang_ and a muffled _ow!_ “ _What kind of situation?”_ Her voice took on a worried edge. _“Is that gunfire I hear?”_

“Unfortunately, yes.” Said Keith, his eyes flicking about the room as he did. It was dusty, dark, and filled to the ceiling with crates. A single, narrow window was set high in the ceiling. “Our part of the op has been compromised. We’ve got about six guards on us. Maybe more.”

 _“Are you okay? Do you need backup?_ ”

“We’re fine for now.” Said Shiro. “We’re in a storeroom in the north sector, but there’s a window that should get us out. Can you rendezvous with us at the Black Lion in five dobashes?”

“ _Soon as I get out of this – blasted – shaft!”_ Hope grunted.

Keith was already dragging a crate over towards the window. Shiro joined him, and after a few dobashes (and quite a lot of huffing and puffing) they’d managed to stack enough crates to reach the window.

The sound of gunfire had ceased once the aliens realized where the two intruders had gone. Now there was shouting and banging on the other side of the door.

Shiro and Keith looked at each other in alarm.

“Crap.” They both said, and at a nod from Shiro, Keith immediately began to climb the rickety staircase towards the window.

“Whatever this is, it isn’t glass!” He called after a few moments of pounding on the window. There was no latch or anything to open it. “See if your Galra arm can bust it.”

Keith climbed down, trying to ignore the growing sense of panic as the shouting and banging in the hallway intensified. The makeshift crate staircase wobbled dangerously as Shiro climbed up, but to Keith’s immense relief, the window shattered after one swipe from Shiro’s powered-up Galra arm, spraying shards of clear material all over the place.

“Come on!” Shiro shouted, already scrambling through the tight space onto the spongy alien ground outside. His voice was hoarse, and Keith didn’t need to see his face to know Shiro was barely containing his own panic. Though this decrepit alien base was nothing like a Galra facility, Keith knew this mission was difficult for Shiro in more ways than one, especially with this claustrophobic storeroom. The place was even starting to take a toll on Keith. His heart thudded with each bang from outside, and his limbs were beginning to shake. But he steeled his nerve. Now wasn’t the time to freak out.

 _So far, so good_. He thought as he began to climb the crates towards Shiro’s outstretched hand. _Now if Hope can get out just as fast, we’ll be home free._ There was a hissing noise from the door and Keith instinctively looked behind him. To his horror, he saw the wheel-like handle in the center of the door begin to turn, creaking as it did.

“Hurry!” Shiro called. He was crouched on the ground outside, which was level with the window, peering back into the storeroom and holding out his hand for Keith to grab. Just as Keith reached the top, two things happened at once.

Just like last time, Keith had next to no warning before the back of his throat and nose began to water. And just like last time, the sneeze was loud and explosive. But last time Keith hadn’t been perched on a rickety staircase made of crates.

The instant the door crashed open was the same moment Keith’s sneeze overtook him and he lost his careful balance. He felt the crate beginning to tip beneath him just as there was a loud bang from the doorway and something hit the back of his left shoulder. The force sent him careening forward, straight into Shiro’s outstretched arms. There was another bang, followed by another hard punch, this time in his left thigh. His pounding heart sounded unusually loud, drowning out the shouting and the loud banging, or maybe his ears were just ringing.

Shiro hauled him up by the strength of his Galra arm and through the window. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.” There was a deep, burning pain in Keith’s shoulder and thigh, but they could deal with that once they got to Black.

_This day just keeps getting worse._

The cause of the pain didn’t register.

Hope sat on the edge of the Black Lion’s lower jaw, her feet dangling over the edge. The great beast had lowered her head at her approach, but there was nothing Hope could do to prepare for departure. All she could do was wait.

“Guys, I’m at the Black Lion. Where are you?”

The comms crackled to life almost immediately, but instead of Shiro’s calm, collected ‘team leader’ voice, she was met with panicked shouting interjected by heavy breathing.

“ _Hope! I need you to get the first aid kit from under Black’s console! Keith’s been shot!_ ”

Hope scrambled to her feet. “He’s been _what_?!”

“ _Just get the kit, please! Have towels ready, gauze, anything! We need to stop the bleeding! I’m coming in hot!”_

Hope was already darting back into Black’s cockpit, diving under the console looking for the little Altean blue box she’d helped restock only a few quintants ago. She was now immensely glad she’d thought to pack extra gauze pads in each kit. She had no idea how badly Keith was hurt – gunshot wounds varied greatly in severity depending on where they were, but Shiro’s voice had been on the verge of breaking. Hope had never heard him so panicked, and it only tightened the twisting in her gut. So far, her brain was clear.

_First aid kit. Gauze. Get it ready. Stop the bleeding._

When Shiro appeared, carrying Keith bridal-style in his strong arms, Hope’s first impression was that Shiro almost looked worse than Keith – his face was as white as his hair floof and his arms and legs were shaking. The left side of Keith’s armor was coated in slick red, which matched his armor. Hope hadn’t noticed it at first glance.

“Black, get us out of here.” Shiro commanded, his voice wavering, and immediately there was a rumbling beneath their feet. The lion growled, which Hope felt all the way down in her queasy gut, and sprang lightly into the air, climbing steadily away from the strange planet where things had gone so, so wrong.

Shiro was setting Keith down on the floor of the cockpit against the wall, all while Keith was insisting he was fine.

“You’re absolutely _not_ fine.” Hope snapped, though it wasn’t out of anger. “Last time you said you were fine you passed out on the floor of Red’s hangar in front of everyone. Hold still and let’s get your armor off.”

She took a gauze pad and immediately pressed it against the outside of his thigh, where the second wound was. Her worry lessened ever so slightly once she saw it was little more than a graze, a glancing blow.

The wound in his shoulder was much more serious. Had he not lost an alarming amount of blood already, Hope would probably make some kind of bad joke about having a wound in his _other_ shoulder to match the slash scar he’d gotten from the Blade of Marmora. But as Shiro finally wiggled his chest armor off and Hope was able to press another gauze pad to the hole, the severity wiped every last trace of potential humor out of her mind.

“Which side were you hit from?” She asked, pressing down on both his thigh and shoulder with each hand. She was worried the alarmingly large hole in his shoulder was an exit wound, which meant he would be bleeding from _both_ sides.

“Back, I think.” Keith mumbled, which made Hope’s heart sink. The almost incoherent tone rang even more warning bells in her head. Up close, she could see his skin was beginning to lose its color and his face had that confused, half-lidded expression that Hope had learned after the Blade of Marmora incident was a big indicator he was dealing with blood loss.

Shiro cursed and peeled Keith away from the wall a bit to peer at his back. His hands were shaking, and Hope realized he was dangerously close to losing his head.

She didn’t dwell on that odd fact. Her own head was miraculously clear, and she needed to make use of that and be strong for _all_ their sakes.

“What do we do?” Shiro was asking, his voice little more than a whisper. With a start, Hope realized he was looking to _her_ for guidance, which was enough to cause her brain to momentarily fog up.

“Stop the bleeding, of course.” She said, sounding more in control than she felt. The gauze beneath her hand had already bled through. Within moments it would be completely soaked. She grabbed another gauze pad and transferred both of her hands to the shoulder wound, using her bent knee and her own body weight to put pressure on his leg, until she was practically sitting in Keith’s lap.

“Grab another pad and put pressure on his back.” She said to Shiro. Her muscles were starting to ache from the force she was applying to Keith’s shoulder. Keith began to squirm a little under her touch and his breathing had quickened, underlaid with groans of pain that twisted their way around Hope’s heart. She ignored them and kept pressing.

After about thirty ticks, however, it became devastatingly clear that merely applying pressure was not going to work. The wound in his thigh was almost clotted (it was barely a graze), but both sides of his shoulder were still gushing an alarming amount of blood. Keith would bleed out faster than the wounds would clot at this rate.

“Shiro, this isn’t working.” Hope said, panting slightly under the strain of trying to keep as much pressure on Keith’s wound as her spindly arms would allow. “We need something else to stop the bleeding and we needed it _yesterday_.”

Keith twisted beneath the pressure of her hands, letting out a weak cry. At some point, he had closed his eyes, but now they flew open, and beneath the haze of pain, there was a flash of embarrassment.

“What should we do?” Shiro asked again, still in that terrified whisper that scared Hope almost more than Keith’s injuries. “There’s nothing else here we could use.”

“How long until we reach the castle?” Hope asked, shifting her weight to keep her knee firmly pressed on Keith’s leg. Keith moaned again, and the sound tore a different kind of hole through Hope’s heart.

Shiro shook his head. “Too long.” His face brightened a little. “Could we use a tourniquet?”

Hope shook her head. “For his leg, maybe, but that’s not the main concern. It’s his shoulder – there’s no way to put a tourniquet on that.”

The light left Shiro’s face as quickly as it had come.

Hope’s hands were becoming slick with blood. Ignoring the way it squished between her fingers, she grabbed yet another gauze pad, locked her elbows and pressed even harder on Keith’s shoulder while her eyes darted around the cockpit, looking for something, _anything_ they could use to keep Keith from bleeding out.

Keith grimaced again, not even trying to hide his discomfort anymore, and swallowed thickly. When he spoke, his voice was a thin croak.

“Shiro, your hand.”

It took a moment for the two to realize what he was saying. Hope let out a quiet gasp, as if the cockpit had suddenly turned ice-cold. Shiro’s face seemed to grow even paler, if that were possible.

“No.” He said quietly, almost choking on the word. “No, I can’t. I had to do that to myself back at the arena. I almost died from infection. I can’t – there’s no way I could do that to you.”

“I don’t think we have many options, Shiro.” Hope said, feeling rather sick. Though she had never witnessed what they were thinking of doing, she knew enough to know it would be ten times worse than what she’d had to deal with after Keith’s Trials of Marmora. At least she knew for certain what to do for a concussion. This? This was too much.

A light touch on her arm startled her. Keith was looking her straight in the eyes, his own set and determined. “It’ll be okay, Hope. You know what to do, right?”

She nodded.

“Then I’ll be alright.”

Tears pricked at the corners of Hope’s eyes, but she didn’t have the hands to spare to wipe them away. The irony was not lost on her.

 _Keith, you’re bleeding out all over Black’s floor and_ you’re _the one comforting_ me _?_

Now that they had their solution, as gruesome as they all knew it was going to be, there wasn’t a moment to waste. Hope moved one of her hands to the entry wound at Keith’s back, allowing Shiro both hands to pull Keith away from the wall and lay him flat on the floor, tucking a rolled-up emergency blanket beneath his neck and a wad of fresh gauze between his shoulder and the floor, freeing one of Hope’s hands to grab an antiseptic spray and some fast-acting Altean painkillers from the kit. She tried not to think about Keith’s blood being smeared all over as she lifted the gauze enough for Shiro to tear Keith’s suit away from his shoulder. Wiping one hand on the side of her own flight suit, Hope took the painkillers and slipped them into Keith’s mouth. He was going to need them. His throat bobbed sharply as he swallowed, and for one horrible moment, she thought he was going to start coughing. To her relief, he didn’t.

Now came the worst part. Shiro’s white face had now taken on a greenish tinge, and he looked about seconds away from losing his lunch. Hope didn’t blame him. Her own stomach felt queasy and she was very close to vomiting, too. Despite the sweat lining her brow, she felt cold, like her body somehow knew what was about to happen, and it took all she had to keep her nerve from snapping like one of those emergency glowsticks.

Keith, ironically, seemed the calmest out of the three of them. Hope couldn’t tell if it was due to confusion or not. His voice was only barely quavering as he met Shiro’s gaze and tried to comfort him the same way he’d done Hope.

“You can do this, Shiro. I’ll be okay. _We’ll_ be okay.”

Shiro just let out a choked breath before looking over at Hope, who nodded.

“Do it.” She said through gritted teeth. “We haven’t any more time.”

Shiro’s hand lit up, a ghostly white light in the dim cockpit, and Hope peeled back the gauze to douse the wound with antiseptic before giving Shiro a sharp nod. Her now-free hand found Keith’s and curled around it tightly, as if letting go would somehow lose him.

The sizzling sound of burning flesh hit her just before the smell did and she gagged, choking on bile just as Keith tipped his head back and _screamed_. His legs thrashed wildly, and he began to arch his back in an involuntary effort to get away.

At once, Hope threw herself over his lower torso to keep him from jarring his shoulder. The hand she was holding gripped hers so tightly it was beginning to hurt. But that hardly mattered. She would let Keith break her hand in two if only they could get through this. Her eyes were blurry, and she barely registered when Shiro lifted his hand, motioning for Hope to help him flip Keith over so he could patch the entry hole.

“Keith, it’s okay, buddy.” He kept murmuring. “It’s okay. You’re doing so well. That was the worst one, we’re almost done. Hang on, buddy, _hang on._ ”

Keith was in too much pain to comprehend much. As Shiro’s hand touched his skin a second time, he gave another wail that choked off halfway through, leaving him gasping like a fish. Somehow it was a worse sound than the first one. It was easier to control his erratic movements with him lying on his stomach, but his legs were still thrashing about. All Hope could do was hold him down as hard as she could and shut her already blurry eyes, so she couldn’t see his face contorted in agony. Even with the painkillers, she knew it must be nigh unbearable.

With a choked cry of his own, Shiro yanked his hand away from Keith’s back and scrambled backwards, like a sleepy camper suddenly confronted with a snake. Both he and Hope were panting heavily, and for almost a dobash, neither moved. Keith continued to whimper and struggle feebly until he collapsed completely, utterly spent.

Hope released the breath she’d been holding, feeling the almost euphoric rush of relief that assailed her. It was over. Thank the _stars_ it was over.

Shakily, she sat up, realizing she still had to bandage the wound in Keith’s thigh before she could go and comfort him. Her hands were surprisingly steady as she wrapped the bandage tightly around his leg, which had thankfully stopped bleeding almost entirely.

Shiro was tapping Keith’s other shoulder, his face a sheen of sweat and tears. “Keith? Keith, answer me, buddy. Are you okay?”

He was met with a feeble whimper. Hope crawled around Keith’s prone body towards his head, hardly daring to look down at the sheen of blood covering the floor. Gently, so as not to upset the delicate wound any further, Shiro helped her lift him up from the floor and onto his good side, then back onto his back again with his head pillowed in her lap. All three of them were breathless, shaking, and covered in blood that was now drying in stiff clumps on the ends of hair or in dark stains on their armor and suits. But Keith was alive, and he would be fine as soon as they got him to a healing pod.

“Shiro, you should probably hail the castle.” Hope said, her voice wavering from the giddy relief that was still coming in waves. “Let Coran know we need a healing pod.”

Shiro didn’t move. Instead, he leaned over, putting one hand on Keith’s chest and the other arm around Hope’s back. “Thank you.” He whispered. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t the calm, strong leader you needed. You both did so well. I’m so proud of you.”

“It’s okay, Shiro.” Hope replied. “Keith is alive, and that’s all that matters. We saved him, and we couldn’t have done it without you.”

Keith shifted a little in an attempt to find a better position, but he was so utterly spent, he fell limp after only a few movements.

Hope brushed a few sweaty strands of hair off his face, leaving faint bloody trails across his forehead. Keith opened his eyes, which were bleary with residual pain and exhaustion.

“Told you I’d be okay.” He whispered, the ghost of a smile on his cracked lips.

“You hush.” Hope told him, although she might have laughed. “Save your strength.”

Keith’s eyes slipped close once more, but this time his face was peaceful.

When the Black Lion arrived at the castle a few dobashes later, Coran and Allura found Keith asleep in the middle of the cockpit, his head still cradled in Hope’s lap with Shiro crouched protectively over them both.

**Author's Note:**

> Check out my Bad Things Happen Bingo card on my Tumblr!  
> https://ladylienda.tumblr.com/


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